Columbia University President Lee Bollinger (left) poses with Elizabeth McGowan, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer of InsideClimate News — winners of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting — during the award ceremony at Columbia University’s Law Library on May … more >

As newspapers fold and reporters are laid off, nonprofit journalism websites funded by foundations have moved in to fill the void with the kind of investigative coverage many news outlets no longer can afford.

The problem, say conservatives, is that some of those nonprofit sites act less as objective purveyors of news than as disseminators of liberal propaganda, funded by foundations with a left-of-center agenda, especially on environmental issues.

With that in mind, the conservative Media Research Center unveiled Thursday its effort to shed light on where such outlets receive their funding with a website called “Buying Bias: Discover the Network of Billionaires Behind Non-Profit Journalism.”

“In the last decade, traditional news outlets have shrunk newsrooms and laid off 40 percent of [the] nation’s journalists, paving the way for the rise of advocacy journalism under the guise of nonprofit journalism,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of business for the Media Research Center.

At the top of the list is InsideClimate News, a 9-year-old website funded by the liberal Rockefeller and Park foundations that has targeted ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies as it promotes what critics describe as thinly disguised climate change advocacy.

Even so, InsideClimate has been embraced by the journalism community while garnering the industry’s highest honors, including a 2013 Pulitzer Prize and a Pulitzer finalist nod in 2016 for a series accusing Exxon of hiding its research on climate change.